With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

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THIS WEEK IN BRIEF:

• Citing cross-border fentanyl trafficking, Trump again imposes and then withdraws tariffs on Mexico: President Trump followed up on a threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Mexico and Canada. The main reason cited was production and trafficking of fentanyl, which has been declining, though it seems apparent that the President’s disdain for trade agreements is a larger factor. Trump later lifted tariffs on most goods for another month.
• Vance brings cabinet members to Eagle Pass: Vice President Vance went to the border with the Homeland Security and Defense secretaries. His remarks focused mainly on organized crime in Mexico, not migration.
• February saw the fewest Border Patrol migrant apprehensions this century, and perhaps since the 1960s: Donald Trump revealed that Border Patrol apprehended 8,326 migrants along the border in February, which would be the fewest since at least 2000, the earliest year for which public data are available. Monthly averages were lower than that from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and during and before World War II. As occurred during the first months of Trump’s first term, migrants and smugglers are pausing their decisions to try to enter the country.
• The U.S. military presence grows at the border: With the deployment of a Stryker brigade combat team and general support aviation battalion, the number of active-duty military personnel at the border will soon reach 9,000. The overall number of uniformed personnel could be over four times the number of monthly migrant apprehensions.
• “Mass deportation” slows a bit, pending new money from Congress: Deportation flights increased modestly in February, and costly military flights have nearly halted since February 21. The Guantánamo Bay naval base is receiving fewer detainees amid cost concerns and interagency coordination issues. The White House is disappointed by its slow start, but a giant spending measure moving haltingly through Congress could remove its funding bottlenecks. Policy changes underway range from easing the firing of immigration judges to expanding expedited removal throughout the country to reopening family detention facilities.
• Notes on the impact in Mexico and further south: Asylum applications are way up in Mexico even as migrant shelters empty. Numbers of migrants giving up and returning to South America have grown to the point that Costa Rica and Panama are facilitating southbound transportation.

THE FULL UPDATE:

Citing cross-border fentanyl trafficking, Trump again imposes and then withdraws tariffs on Mexico

As he had threatened to do, President Donald Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on all goods from Mexico and Canada effective March 4. Two days later, as markets tumbled, Trump exempted most products from tariffs for another month, until April 2. It was the second time in two months that Trump placed, then withdrew, tariffs on Mexican and Canadian products.

A White House fact sheet contended that the United States’ neighbors had “failed to adequately address…the dangerous cartel activity and influx of lethal drugs flowing into our country.” It added, “Mexican drug trafficking organizations, the world’s leading fentanyl traffickers, operate unhindered due to an intolerable relationship with the government of Mexico,” accusing the Mexican government of having “afforded safe havens” for drug trafficking organizations to operate.

The government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took several steps over the past months to forestall the tariffs, including deploying 10,000 National Guard soldiers to the U.S. border; stepping up efforts against organized crime in Sinaloa; and transferring (not formally extraditing) 29 organized crime leaders to the United States.

Between February 5 and March 3, the Mexican government reported, operations near Mexico’s northern border yielded “1,026 people arrested and the seizure of 1,040 firearms, 113,058 cartridges of various calibers, 3,990 magazines, 17,187.12 kilograms of drugs including 55. 9 kilos of fentanyl, as well as 870 vehicles and 116 properties.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised these steps during a February 28 meeting of both nations’ top security and justice officials in Washington. Still, a Washington Post analysis noted, “the border operation underscores the difficulty of finding the opioid—especially for a country with a weak, underfunded security structure.”

As noted in WOLA’s February 28 Border Update, fentanyl seizures have been declining at the border for well over a year. However, without offering benchmarks, the Trump administration is setting a maximalist tone.

“Yes, the flow of narcotics has decreased,” Ricardo Moreno, the deputy director of Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Office of Field Operations, told the Mexican daily Milenio. “But if there is one [seizure] event it is a lot, and that is what President Trump wants: not an ounce, not a gram, not a pound of fentanyl can enter the United States, be it methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana.”

In an episode of WOLA’s podcast, Mexico Program Director Stephanie Brewer questioned whether the tariff gambit is really about seeking a deal to curb fentanyl flows.

At this point, Trump seems not to want even a transactional relationship, but rather to blow up the relationship. Or at least he’s acting in a way that undermines any confidence in and trust in the relationship…  There’s this idea that the goal of a relationship with another country is just to force them to do a series of things, not necessarily give them anything clear in return.

Brian Winter, the editor of Americas Quarterly, saw “the dreaded concept of ‘delinkage’—the idea that no matter how thoroughly Sheinbaum cooperated on bilateral issues, the Trump administration was determined to press ahead with major tariffs anyway,” because of a larger desire to undo more than 30 years of “free trade” policy.

President Sheinbaum had promised to announce retaliatory “tariff and non-tariff measures” on March 9 in a public event in Mexico City’s Zócalo. As of late on March 6, it was not clear whether Trump’s tariff delay had led her to alter that plan.

A February 27 New York Times investigation revealed a split within the Trump White House over “how hard to go on Mexican cartels.” While the split had more to do with offensive operations against Mexican organized crime than with tariffs, it is noteworthy that the more dovish faction in this narrative is represented by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, an anti-immigration hardliner who worries that “to go too hard” might cause Mexico to let up on efforts to block migrants from reaching the U.S. border.

Vance brings cabinet members to Eagle Pass

On March 5, Vice President JD Vance visited the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Vance devoted much of his public remarks not to migration, but to still-developing efforts to fight Mexican organized crime.

“I’m not going to make any announcements about any invasions of Mexico here today,” the Vice President said. When reporters asked again whether the administration might “invade,” Vance said “No, next question.”

There is a difference, of course, between an “invasion” and strikes on targets inside Mexico without Mexico’s consent, an option that Hegseth has refused to rule out. The Defense Secretary repeated that “all options are on the table,” but seemed to indicate a willingness instead to assist Mexican forces fighting organized crime. “It’s their country; it’s their fight, and we want them to lead that fight.”

Vance added that the new administration expects to accelerate plans to build a barrier across the entire 1,970-mile border: “I think the president’s hope is that by the end of the term we build the entire border wall. And of course that’s the physical structure, the border wall itself, but we even heard today, there are so many good technological tools. So many great artificial intelligence-enabled technologies.”

February saw the fewest Border Patrol migrant apprehensions this century, and perhaps since the 1960s

“The month of February, my first full month in Office, had the LOWEST number of Illegal Immigrants trying to enter our Country in History – BY FAR!” President Trump posted to his social network on March 2, citing 8,326 apprehensions by Border Patrol agents at the border. CBS News obtained a similar estimate (8,450) from CBP on March 1. CBP will publish an “official” February apprehensions number sometime in mid-March.

“This means that very few people came – The Invasion of our Country is OVER,” Trump’s missive continued. This is a remarkable thing for the President to have stated in writing, since at least three of his executive orders—suspending the entry of asylum seekers, expanding the military’s border role, aspects of “mass deportations,” and other policies—declare the United States to be facing an “invasion.”

The border closure and asylum suspension order leaned heavily into the assumption of emergency authorities based on the existence of an “invasion,” citing Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. Now, the President on record declaring that “invasion” to be over.

On Twitter, DHS Secretary Noem echoed Trump’s assertion that this was the “lowest number in recorded history.”

A migrant apprehensions number in the mid-8,000s would be the lowest in the more than 25 years for which monthly data are available, below the previous low of 11,127 measured in April 2017, in the first months of Trump’s first term. Then as now, migrants and smugglers were pausing their decisions as a new president promising an anti-migrant crackdown assumed office. However, numbers were at least a bit higher eight years ago because the first Trump administration did not act immediately to curb the legal right to asylum at the border.

A number in the mid-8,000s is not the smallest ever, though. Before fiscal year 2000, we only have annual apprehension numbers from Border Patrol, but dividing those by 12 shows monthly averages below 8,326 occurring from the mid-1950s to 1967, and in all years before 1947.

President Trump repeated that “lowest ever recorded” claim in his March 4 address to the U.S. Congress. This was one of the speech’s border and migration-related statements that the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler fact-checked shortly afterward. Kessler also ruled “false” Trump’s oft-repeated claim that “virtually all” unauthorized border-crossers include “murderers, drug dealers, gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums were released into our country.”

The U.S. military presence grows at the border

The Defense Department announced a new phase of deployments that could bring the number of active duty military personnel at the U.S.-Mexico border to 9,000—a number greater than February’s migrant apprehensions (see above).

These 9,000 troops—many of whom are not at the border yet but will arrive in coming weeks—are in addition to about 16,500 Border Patrol agents, about 2,200 federalized National Guard personnel, and about 4,500 Texas state National Guard personnel. Add a few thousand CBP officers at ports of entry and Texas state police assigned to border missions, and the ratio of uniformed personnel to monthly apprehended migrants is now well over four to one.

The newest deployment is a Stryker brigade combat team (SBCT) and a general support aviation battalion (GSAB) from the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson in Colorado. The SBCT has about 4,400 or 2,400 members, and the GSAB about 650 (sources provide varying personnel numbers). The New York Times called them “one of the Army’s most seasoned combat units.”

“This is the second time since 2012 Strykers have deployed to the southern border,” explained the Denver Gazette, adding, “a Stryker is a light armored vehicle designed to give infantry troops armor protection without deploying full-fledged battle tanks.”

“Defense Department officials have left open the possibility that as many as 10,000 troops could deploy in the coming days,” the Times added, noting that the Marine Corps “could be asked to supply 2,500 or more additional Marines.”

So far at least, troops on federal missions are not carrying out immigration enforcement or playing confrontational roles on the borderline, as Texas National Guard personnel under state command have been doing. Like National Guard personnel sent to the border on federal missions since the George W. Bush administration, their role is back from the front lines.

A Northern Command release reported that the Stryker Brigade’s tasks “will include detection and monitoring; administrative support; transportation support; warehousing and logistic support; vehicle maintenance; and engineering support.” However, “Personnel will not conduct or be involved in interdiction or deportation operations.”

In a March 3 commentary, WOLA outlined the dangers to democracy, human rights, and civil-military relations of giving armed forces increased border and migration management roles. This danger applies inside the United States and through encouragement of other nations’ militaries, like those of Mexico and Guatemala, to adopt these roles.

“Mass deportation” slows a bit, pending new money from Congress

Deportation flights

Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border issued the latest in a five-year series of monthly reports tracking U.S. deportation aircraft, covering February 2025. Despite much official talk of a “mass deportation” campaign using military planes, the report found only a modest increase in the tempo of flights removing migrants from the United States last month.

• Cartwright counted 126 removal flights in February and 157 between January 24 and February 28.
• Of those, 27 were military aircraft.
• On an average weekday in February, the U.S. government ran 6.3 deportation flights (1.0 military and 5.3 non-military), up from 5.4 per weekday in November-January and down from 6.9 per weekday in February 2024.
• Some of February’s most frequent removal destinations were 24 flights to Guatemala (7 military), 22 to Honduras (2), 13 to Mexico (0, Mexico had prohibited the use of military aircraft for removals to their country), 11 to El Salvador (1), 7 to Ecuador (2), 7 to Colombia (all Colombian aircraft retrieving citizens), 4 to Peru (1), 4 to India (3), 3 to Panama (3), and 3 to Venezuela (Venezuelan aircraft retrieving citizens). 13 small jets went to African nations.
• Cartwright has counted 47 deportation flights leaving Panama since August 2024, returning migrants who passed through the Darién Gap jungle route. Of the Panamanian government’s mostly U.S.-funded flights, 32 have returned migrants to Colombia, 13 to Ecuador, 1 to India, and 1 to India and Vietnam. Only four flights operated in February, partly due to a sharp reduction in Darién Gap migration (below).

Military deportation flights slow

Cartwright’s report noted that the use of military aircraft for deportation has pulled back sharply: only one military flight has operated since February 21 (on March 1). The Wall Street Journal confirmed the slowdown in military deportation flights, reporting that “using military aircraft to transport some migrants to their home countries or to a military base at Guantanamo Bay has proved expensive and inefficient.”

Three deportation flights to India, for instance, cost about $3 million apiece, the Journal found. “Some flights carried a dozen people to Guantanamo at a cost of at least $20,000 per migrant.” A C-17 cargo plane, which the Defense Department had fitted with passenger seats, costs $28,500 per hour to operate and has had to take longer routes because some countries, like Mexico, restrict foreign military planes from their airspace. The per-hour cost of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) charter planes is about one-quarter of that, NBC News calculated, and those usually hold more passengers.

“The pause on such [military] flights could be extended or made permanent, officials said” to the Wall Street Journal, though Gen. Randall Reed, the commander of U.S. Transportation Command, told a congressional hearing that he stands ready to run more flights.

Despite the costs and inefficiencies, the Trump administration wanted to use military planes “to send a message about their intent to get tough on immigrants in the country illegally,” defense officials told the Journal. Cartwright added, “I continue to believe that military cargo aircraft is being used solely to support the spurious assertion that the US is being ‘invaded’ and the military is necessary to quell the invasion. Moreover, the use of cargo planes is only to image that these humans are not worthy of the dignity of civilized transport.”

Use of the Guantánamo base also slows

On February 20, the Trump administration moved out of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station all 178 of the Venezuelan migrants it had been holding there for as much as 2 1/2 weeks, sending all but 1 of them back to Venezuela via Honduras. (See WOLA’s February 21 Border Update.) Since then, an information-dense NBC News piece detailed, the notorious facility in southeastern Cuba has seen much less use as a detention site.

“As of Monday [March 3], 20 people were being held there, according to two other defense officials,” NBC reported. USA Today reported “fewer than 24 migrants” at the base on March 5. None of the current detainees appear to be Venezuelan. A civilian ICE flight arrived at the base on March 6; as of early on March 7 it is not clear whether it had detainees aboard.

Among the findings of NBC News reporters Carol E. Lee, Courtney Kube, Julia Ainsley, and Julie Tsirkin are:

• It cost the Defense Department about $23,000 to $27,000 per detainee to transport them to the base aboard military aircraft.
• As President Trump called to prepare the base to hold 30,000 migrants, troops began putting up dozens of tents to house them without clear guidance about what was required. The tents “lack air conditioning and running water and do not meet ICE standards for detention,” it turned out; as USA Today recalled, “ICE detention is supposed to be non-punitive and requires safe and humane treatment of detainees.” (This is a classic outcome of issuing vague orders to the military, a fast-moving but regimented and costly agency.)
• A “power struggle” ensued between the Defense Department and ICE “over who would be responsible for interacting with migrants once they arrived at Guantánamo… because members of the military cannot legally interact with immigrants in detention.”
• However, soldiers ended up interacting frequently with the detainees because “DHS (ICE’s parent department) sent only one staffer to oversee detention operations and seven contractors when the first migrants started arriving at Guantánamo, and it did not send more until after the first three planes of migrants had arrived.”
• The Defense Department is still awaiting a legal opinion about whether existing statutes truly allow the transport of migrants aboard military planes.
• The Defense Department is considering withdrawing some of the “roughly 1,100” troops (the New York Times reported about 700 soldiers on February 18) that it had surged to Guantánamo when the operation began in early February.
• Now, “there is a growing recognition within the administration that it [using the Guantánamo military base] was a political decision that is just not working.”

Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vehemently denied that the Trump administration is “backing away from housing migrants at Guantanamo.” To that question, Miller replied on March 3, “So far from it. Guantanamo Bay is a pillar of this administration’s plan to deal with and remove high-threat criminal aliens, as well as to increase and expand our overall potential capacity.”

Standing outside the West Wing, Miller emphasized to reporters his view of the “high threat” the migrants represent:

I don’t want to get into any operational details, but you’re talking about individuals… I’m not— I’m not getting excited when I say this. If they were this close as we are right now, they have the ability to grab a sharp object, they would kill the person that far away in half a second. That is how dangerous they are. If they are not in a state of constant control, physical control and monitoring, I mean, you give them a pair of eyeglasses, they would break off a piece of the eyeglass, and they would stab someone right through the neck. I mean, that’s how dangerous these individuals are.

In fact, subsequent reporting has revealed that nearly a third of the Venezuelan men sent to Guantánamo had no U.S. criminal record, and some of those who did were charged with minor, non-violent crimes.

A bipartisan congressional delegation, from members of the House Armed Services Committee, plans to visit Guantánamo in coming days, “as soon as Friday” March 7, USA Today reported.

No new “bridge” deportations

Last week saw no repeat of the Trump administration’s five February flights—three to Panama (299 people) and two to Costa Rica (200 people)—sending removed citizens of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe to those countries. The administration pledged to fund those migrants’ subsequent returns to their home countries.

Many of these individuals remain in Costa Rica and Panama. Both nations’ governments have sent them to rustic facilities, hours’ drive away from their capitals, that until recently hosted northbound migrants who had passed through the Darién Gap. (As noted below, that migration flow has dwindled.)

In Panama, about 112 of the 299 removed individuals have expressed fear of return to their countries; they are stranded at the San Vicente camp near the Darién Gap. (See an AJ+ video about this, featuring commentary by WOLA staff.) The Associated Press, citing Panama’s deputy foreign minister, reported that “a small number are in contact with international organizations and the UN Refugee Agency as they weigh whether to seek asylum in Panama.” The migrants are confined at the remote site, which is tightly guarded, and have been denied permission to talk to attorneys.

“A group of high-profile lawyers” has filed suit before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission on these migrants’ behalf, the New York Times reported, alleging that the U.S. government violated their right to protection and that Panama is denying them access to counsel. The AP reported that Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino “questioned the idea that migrants would even have lawyers. ‘Doesn’t it seem like a coincidence that those poor people have lawyers in Panama?’”

Deportations into Mexico

The Trump administration continues to carry out deportations into Mexico, mainly across the land border. “To date, since January 20, 2025, 19,663 people have returned, of which 15,611 are Mexican and 4,052 are foreigners,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on March 3. “Yesterday there were only 313 people.” It is not clear whether this number includes aerial deportations into Mexico, which as of February 26 stood at 1,650 people.

Sheinbaum noted that, as with the tempo of ICE deportation flights, the number of deportees into Mexico since January 20 has not been as massive as the Trump administration had been warning. “‘Mexico Embraces You’ has received very few people,” she said, referring to her government’s program to receive an expected wave of deported Mexican citizens.

Trump is frustrated

While ICE carried out nearly 23,000 arrests in February, well over the average during the Biden administration, “daily arrests have fallen since immigration agents exploded out of the gates in the opening days of Mr. Trump’s term,” the New York Times reported. Deportations have barely increased, leading to overcrowding in ICE’s detention facilities, which according to CBS News are at 120 percent capacity.

President Trump continues to demand updates and complain about the pace. His White House “border czar,” Tom Homan, blames a lack of funding, the Times noted. Congress has not passed a 2025 budget; it must do so, or maintain the government at 2024 levels, by March 14. As a result, the new administration continues to carry out its deportation plan at resource levels set during the Biden administration.

The “reconciliation” budget package: coming, but delayed

Working with the Republican-majority House and Senate, the administration is developing a spending package that would provide a massive amount of resources for “mass deportation,” border security, and similar priorities. Under a sparingly used congressional rule called “reconciliation,” it could pass the Senate with a simple majority—no “filibuster” maneuver possible—and not a single Democratic vote.

The first step for this bill is passage of a budget resolution directing congressional committees to draw up their spending wishlists. A version passed by the House directs $90 billion for DHS, while the Senate version would provide $175 billion. Similarly large amounts may go to the Defense and Justice departments. The two houses need to agree on an identical resolution to move the process forward, at which point we might see more details about what this tremendous amount of money might pay for.

Though the Trump administration and congressional Republican leaders wanted to move this bill during the first weeks of 2025, the two chambers have had strategic and procedural disagreements, delaying the measure. The Senate may not be able to resolve differences with the House’s budget resolution “until late March at least,” Politico reported.

Other measures being pursued or proposed

• While the slowdowns in military deportation flights and Guantánamo detention point to coordination issues with the Defense Department, the New York Times noted that the counter-migration mission is burdening the FBI as well. An unnamed former official said that agents and analysts in the FBI’s Washington field office “have expressed frustration about doing immigration work rather than pursuing threats to national security, including monitoring Russian intelligence officers operating in the United States.”
• The Justice Department sent a memo to all 700 immigration judges in the Department’s court system stating that they “can no longer count on civil service rules that safeguard their independence by protecting them from arbitrary removal,” the New Republic reported. This could make it easier for the Trump administration to fire a judge who, in its view, grants asylum too often.
• In February the administration fired about 15 immigration judges and 13 managers from the immigration court system, or Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). Five of the judges were in Texas. About 20 more judges appear to be resigning, accepting the new administration’s “fork in the road” buyout offer. The reduction to EOIR’s workforce, which Mother Jones called a “ purge,” promises to compound delays in a system with a backlog of over 3.7 million pending immigration cases.
• Under a 1996 law, some migrants can be placed in expedited removal, a rapid process that allows for the removal of an undocumented migrant from the country without involving an immigration judge, unless they claim fear of returning to their home country and pass a credible fear interview.. The U.S. government has usually applied expedited removal to people apprehended near the U.S.-Mexico border who arrived recently in the United States. However, a February 18 ICE memo calls for placing in expedited removal people apprehended anywhere in the country who came within the past two years. The Washington Post reported that the memo even “targets people who arrived via parole, most of them legally, even if they have been in the United States longer than two years.” More than 1 million people who arrived under the Biden administration’s alternative legal pathway programs, including those fleeing Ukraine and Afghanistan, could end up in expedited removal proceedings if they have not applied to adjust their status. “The move,” the Post observed, “is jarring advocates for immigrants because expedited proceedings move so quickly, and it is difficult to locate immigrants and defend them.”
• The same memo calls for finding third countries that might accept people who cannot be deported because an immigration judge has ruled, under the Convention Against Torture, that they might face torture in their home countries.
• In a departure from the administration’s earlier statements prioritizing ICE detentions of migrants with criminal histories, the agency is now planning a nationwide operation targeting “adults and minor children who entered the country together and have orders of deportation,” NBC News reported.
• The administration is reopening a “family detention” facility that was opened during the Obama administration and closed during the Biden administration, the Washington Post revealed. The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, can hold up to 2,400 parents and children. It is operated by CoreCivic, a private contractor, which reported that it takes in about $180 million per year in revenue from the facility, including medical services. Under a judicial settlement, DHS may not detain children for more than 20 days, but that limit might be breached for families that already face final removal orders and are awaiting available deportation flights. CBS News revealed that ICE began detaining families on March 6 at the other of two dormant family detention facilities, in Karnes City, Texas. “We need family detention centers,” said Homan, the White House “border czar.”
• Bloomberg, citing the National Center for Youth Law and an unnamed corroborating source, reported that DHS is holding families for 10 days or more at a “soft-sided” facility (large, circus-style tents) run by CBP in Otay Mesa, southeast of San Diego. The families are awaiting final deportation. The Otay Mesa facility is basic and prison-like, designed for stays of less than 72 hours. Like other CBP and Border Patrol holding spaces, it is largely empty right now as new arrivals at the border have plummeted.

Notes on the impact in Mexico and further south

• The Mexican government’s refugee agency (Mexican Refugee Assistance Commission, COMAR) has not released monthly data about asylum applications in Mexico’s system so far this year. Citing a knowledgeable source, though, the Los Angeles Times reported that Mexico’s asylum application “numbers are three to four times greater than before Trump was elected in November, with as many as 1,000 migrants a day starting the process.” Most of the new applicants appear to be among about 270,000 people who were seeking to use the CBP One smartphone app to make appointments at official border crossings to seek protection in the United States; the Trump administration suspended the app’s use, and all appointments, on January 20. In Mexico, the paper reported, “work is ample and food is relatively cheap but…xenophobia, violence and corruption are common.”
• COMAR and other agencies that received indirect U.S. support to help settle migrants elsewhere risk budget cuts due to the Trump administration’s worldwide freezes and cutbacks in foreign assistance, added the story by Los Angeles Times reporter Kate Linthicum.
• As would-be asylum seekers give up on entering the United States and the Trump administration’s promised “mass deportation” has not yet reached massive proportions, Mexico’s border cities are seeing far fewer migrants than in the past few years and charity-run shelters are shutting down, the New York Times reported.
• The same article notes that Mexican National Guard soldiers deployed in response to Trump’s tariff threat are now present at gaps in the border barrier where migrants have frequently crossed, like the Nido de las Águilas sector east of Tijuana near Otay Mesa.
• In Mexico’s easternmost northern border city, Matamoros, which has long been under the influence of the Gulf Cartel and other criminal groups, “the fall in the migrant flow at the border between Tamaulipas and Texas has led to an internal dispute within the Gulf Cartel over control of theft and extortion rackets” instead, the Mexican daily Milenio reported.
• The Ciudad Juárez daily Norte reported that the commissioner of Mexico’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM), Francisco Garduño, paid his 90th visit to the border since assuming office in 2019. The paper noted that on January 24, a Mexican federal judge conditionally suspended a criminal case against Garduño for his agency’s responsibility in a March 2023 fire in a Ciudad Juárez detention facility that killed 40 migrants locked inside. The official must hold a “public apology” event for victims’ relatives, which he has not yet done, hand over remaining compensation money to them, “take courses in Human Rights and Civil Protection, and supervise the detention centers every 3 months.” The ruling has been challenged by the organizations supporting the families of the victims and survivors of the tragedy.
• The Sunday Times of London reported from the Mexico-Guatemala border zone about the small but growing number of migrants seeking to return southward after giving up on plans to seek asylum in the United States after January 20. “We’re crossing back firstly because of the situation at the US border, and the security problems in Mexico,” a Venezuelan mother told reporter Louise Callaghan.
• An outlet called NepYork found that a small number of citizens of Nepal, stranded in Mexico by the Trump administration’s new asylum restrictions, are seeking to return home. “Despite paying human traffickers [actually, smugglers] as much as $100,000 per person, these migrants have been unable to make it past the stringent security measures enforced along the border.”
• Dozens of southbound migrants who have given up on trying to enter the United States, mainly citizens of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, continue to arrive each day at the northern end of the Darién Gap jungle route straddling Panama and Colombia, EFE and others reported. Most are paying boat operators to take them south to Colombia, avoiding the treacherous land route.
• Costa Rica and Panama have begun coordinating bus routes for southbound migrants who pay fares to take them from the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border to a port in Panama from where they may take boats around the Darien Gap.
• Northbound travel through the Darién Gap has nearly ground to a halt. Panama’s National Migration Service reported on February 28 that year-to-date 2025 migration through the dangerous route totaled 2,637 people. As 2,229 of those crossings happened in January, that would mean only 408 people came through the Darién Gap during the first 27 days of February, on track to be the lightest month in that region since November 2020, early in the COVID pandemic.
• Guatemala’s military has stepped up operations on its side of the border with Mexico with the goal of “safeguarding sovereignty in the field of transnational organized crime,” the daily La Hora reported. Dubbed “Operation Western Fire Belt,” the effort near the busy border crossings between Tecún Umán, Guatemala and Tapachula, Chiapas involves feared Kaibil special forces troops and “is also being carried out in collaboration with the Mexican Armed Forces.” Guatemala’s president had announced the creation of new military-police border security task forces during U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s February 5 visit.
• The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on March 4 in the Mexican government’s lawsuit against U.S. gun manufacturers who, it alleges, knowingly supplied weapons to gun shops with reputations for selling to straw purchasers smuggling arms across the border to Mexican criminal groups. According to NPR, Jonathan Lowy, Mexico’s co-counsel and president of Global Action on Gun Violence, argued that about 5 percent of gun dealers “sell to obvious cartel traffickers in bulk sales and repeated sales where the traffickers come into the store repeatedly over weeks and months,” and then bring the weapons south across the border. NBC News noted that questions from the justices, including the Court’s liberal judges, indicated skepticism about Mexico’s case. They will probably issue a decision by mid-year.

Other news

• The U.S. State Department announced that it will be restricting visas for officials from governments “responsible for knowingly facilitating illegal immigration to the United States,” building on previous restrictions on private actors like charter flight companies. A likely target is the government of Nicaragua, which permits visa-free travel from many nationalities for a fee and has poor relations with the United States. It is unclear whether the measure would apply to other governments that register migrants in transit and allow them to pass through their territory without resorting to smugglers, like Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras.
• Sen. Bernie Moreno (R), a freshman from Ohio who sits on the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, may seek to force a vote on his “RULES Act,” which would sharply curtail asylum access at the border, as early as this week because he is “insanely impatient,” Roll Call reported.
• A report from House Judiciary Committee Republicans, with an extensive appendix of data, found that the number of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients increased sharply during the Biden administration, from 410,406 from 10 countries to 1,417,265 from 16 countries.
• Haitian-Americans United Inc., Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, and UndocuBlack Network have filed suit in Boston federal court to reverse the Trump administration’s early cancellation of TPS for citizens of Haiti and Venezuela.
• Andrew Free at the Appeal obtained, through the Freedom Of Information Act, a dataset from the Justice Department’s National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which the Biden administration created in 2022 to track police misconduct and the Trump administration quickly shut down and removed from the internet. The data show that of 94 federal agencies tracked, Bureau of Prisons and CBP employees “comprised more than 70 percent of the more than 5,200 misconduct instances recorded in NLEAD between 2017 and 2024.”
• In a deeply reported feature for Texas Monthly, Elliott Woods traveled to remote areas of Mexico and Guatemala to speak to relatives of migrants who perished on June 27, 2022, when 53 people from Mexico and Central America died of heat inside the container of a tractor-trailer near San Antonio, Texas.
• “There is no evidence that migrants from the Southern border currently pose any major disruptive infectious disease threat to the U.S.,” concluded a column at the medical website STAT from a Johns Hopkins public health professor and an immigration attorney. Amesh Adalja and Agustina Vergara Cid firmly oppose any resumption of the pandemic-era Title 42 expulsions policy.
• A report from the Mexico City-based Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) argued that Mexico cannot be designated as a “Safe Third Country” for asylum seekers, as it lacks necessary conditions to guarantee their security, rights, and non-refoulement. IMUMI found that U.S. policies forcing asylum seekers to remain in Mexico expose them to targeted violence, organized crime, and an underfunded and overwhelmed asylum system.
• A report from the El Paso-based Hope Border Institute and Jesuit Refugee Services examined the harm that U.S. and Mexican migration policies do to migrants’ mental and physical health. Of surveyed migrants, 80 percent experienced violence during their journey through Mexico. Half were robbed, and 20 percent were kidnapped. Of kidnappings, Mexican authorities were involved 30 percent of the time.
• “Hardening” borders, on its own, does not stop unauthorized migration, illicit drugs, or other cross-border concerns, concluded a survey of global trends by Edward Alden and Laurie Trautman at Foreign Affairs. “Border-first approaches may be increasingly popular—and politically appealing—but they are certain to fail, and to hurt many innocent people in the process.”
• Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Illinois), the ranking Democrats on both houses’ Appropriations Subcommittees on Homeland Security, sent DHS Secretary Noem an oversight letter requesting information about, among other items, how the Department is moving resources to implement President Trump’s executive orders.